He Made The Sign

Belinda McMahon

He made the sign.
Come near me and you will die.
He may not still possess the power, but they would be wise to heed the warning.
His power was coming back. 
They worked in the shadows, in parallel reaches, in a world increasingly frightened authorities were  struggling to understand. 
He was sick of the garbage.
He was more than deeply sick of the surveillance.
Surveillance, refined in the 21st Century, was harassment pure and simple. 
He had been bullied since he was a kid, by the brutality of his father, by the kids at school, and he truly hated their guts.
They could posture as protectors as long as they liked. He knew the truth. Jobworths cloaked with all the banality of evil. They liked their wage checks. They cared not for their targets. 
Their crude jokes would get them killed.
I am a vengeful god.
Yeh, well get out of the way.
The military were running trial operations across increasingly large populations.
Sound tracks, visual and audio combinations, triggered all sorts of activity in the human brain. 
The military no longer sought conformity in the target populations. They were looking for something else. 
All they needed to do was to coordinate it, control it, weaponise surprising outcomes.
And there they would be, saints and sinners, enlightened and the blinking out, all addressing the public hysteria of the moment.
Did I not tell you, you are all gods? 
Antidote to Chaos.
Surprisingly, the US Senate proceedings over Judge Kavanaugh, and his entirely implausible accuser "Dr" Christine Ford, represented the high tide of a deliberately engineered moral panic combined with a virulent female chauvinism which had motivated millions and consumed billions in taxpayer funds.
There was no brooking any argument, because they were right. Facts were facts. Women didn't lie about such things. Toxic masculinity was always at fault. Every alleged victim was a sacred site.
Give us a break. 
Humans lie, they lie all the time. 
"Facts are just weapons that men use to batter women and perpetuate the system," as Feminist Jurisprudence states. 
But their alternative "facts" were no facts at all, they were heavily manipulated ideological agendas designed to grant power to the state and destroy traditional society, a Marxist stalking horse propelled from the stables of universities and colleges and perpetuated by the legions of the half-educated.
And now it was over. Well not over, but had finally reached the high water mark.
Rationality, commonsense, decency, all of them were beginning to sneak back into public debate; as people abandoned their rapacious governments with their endless idiot programs and instead went about their lives, found meaning in their own entrails, or trails, common routines, quiet lives.
False accusers retreated behind the panda eyes lining the horizon. They were wrong. They had always been wrong. And they should leave the citizenry alone, these half-baked clones of sensibility.
They played a dangerous game. And they lost.
Because bureaucracies cannot be trusted. Because savages still walked the earth. Because they really were not that far from the trees.
He watched for odd flickers of intelligence, and was surprised, sometimes, by just how dumb they really were.
"Do you feel like you've been stencilled onto the Earth," one of the operatives once asked. "Do you know what I mean?"
He shook his head. One thing he was good at: acting dumb.
Then again there were many delights. Psychellium.
California here I come.
It was all about agendas, and this government's agenda had been and unthinking grasp for power, ever more power, to ignore the bleatings of the subjects over which they ruled, to treat with utter contempt those who paid their wages, to gather wealth unto themselves.
Now they were faced by a righteous anger. 
We were born like this. We were made like this. We evolved in moments and were gone. This short lived species. There had to be other ways to survive.
Psycellium indeed.
Manipulate the time line.
Around him invisible soldiers mumbled their discontent while around them humans  dreamt of oncology reports and alibis.
Of past injustices and fleeting loves, rats in the subterranean aquifers; everything running in parallel.
He knew they were on the hunt and could disappear in a micro-instant.
They were coming for him.
The had come for everybody.
Hold fast your power.
Let them slip away.
There was no point in killing every ant that stepped across his path.
Santa Claus has come, all at once.
They were choking on their own greed.
He had very good reason to hate their guts, to do everything he could to destroy them.
And then the were gone in an instant, these enemies of his.
And another day dawned, in the deep reaches of the suburbs. Cloaked. Always cloaked. They had been pretending to be normal for so long, they almost believed it themselves.
The panda eyes moved closer.
And the gods were roiled. Hold fast your truth. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 


Statistics lie. 
Any number of populist speakers will say that 'we' never had it so good. Yet so-called employment has never been as insecure, free secular, government-funded (sic) schools have never been so expensive, casual work has never been so pervasive, infrastructure (roads, rail, utilities etc) has never been under so much pressure/ nor so neglected - the result of decades of neglect - and the gap between rich and poor never so wide. 
Youth see dwindling opportunities and widespread indifference and broken electoral promises. So does the population at large. 
A seething sense of frustration is abroad, and the current epidemic of knife assaults is one indicator of this. 
Opportunity is not decided upon merit but upon wealth, connection, influence and patronage - we have become a culture/society of men(sic) not Laws. 
Inequality thrives in such an environment - which is an historical phenomenon in this society. Inequality breeds violence - as is, and has been for most of our history, evident in every schoolyard and playing-field. But, whereas, in the past, common values - however crudely-drawn - have put a brake upon tolerance of such conduct - our now racially-culturally diverse, rich society has to look hard to discover what are its common values. Youth is confused. Confusion breeds frustration. This breeds violence.

Rosemary O’Grady is a lawyer and writer.